The Gaming Den

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/56 ... escription

To be honest, I'm normally a sucker for RPG Kickstarters that seem even mildly interesting, if the price is right.

But what a mess this is:
- rolling d100 three times for attributes is going to make some PCs into joke characters and others unstoppable
- rolling a single d10 for all actions will have a terrible whiff factor
- for a "streamlined" system, there certainly is a lot of math involved in calculating wounds and wound penalties

I guess I wouldn't mind reading more about the Prohibition-era urban fantasy setting with undead scab labor, but I'm sure as hell not buying the rest of this pile of crap just for that.

My understanding is that RPG mechanics aren’t patented. Usually you can pick the random number generation methods that seem appropriate for the kind of distribution you desire.

I am always super squeamish about glitzy new systems because almost invariably their inventors have zero fuckin clue how math works and it is both worse than existing methods and also doesn’t give the desired effect they were looking for (or should have been looking for).

I'm pretty sure most young gamers get the bright idea of writing their own RPG system at some point. And hopefully, sooner or later we get a solid enough grasp on the math to understand why the ideas we had when we were 15 were bad.

But the guy making this crap is supposedly an experienced writer who's worked on several games, so he should already know why this system isn't a good idea.

I guess what he actually learned from his vast RPG experience is that if you slap some decent-looking art on your game, people will buy it no matter how crappy the actual content is. I suppose that's a valuable lesson too.

All of your questions are solved by looking at the writer's face... he's clearly into Bad Old Days shit, so all your complains about the system are "features, not bugs."

Let's assume there are two types of people in the world: those who are good at maths and those who are bad at maths. Now, setting aside differences in size, turns out that making a system with bad math is much easier than making a system with good math. And you know who can't tell the difference? All the people who are bad at math.

But because they're bad at math, they'll undoubtedly decide that it is their fault, they'll ditch all the math anyway, and explain how the system is amazing because you can just change everything that doesn't work.

Let's not be surprised this keeps happening.

deaddmwalking wrote: ↑

Fri Apr 29, 2022 5:35 pm

Let's assume there are two types of people in the world...

I'm stealing this whole-cloth for a comic. Just letting you know.

Dogbert wrote: ↑

Sat Apr 30, 2022 3:21 am

deaddmwalking wrote: ↑

Fri Apr 29, 2022 5:35 pm

Let's assume there are two types of people in the world...

I'm stealing this whole-cloth for a comic. Just letting you know.

I'm honored.